Rexercise: an expansion challenge

To my disappointment, this appears to be a situation where worker first is not your best play.

Worker first arrives at T15. As your tech now stands, all he can do is farm a couple grassland plots, which is not too exciting. You can tech Animal Husbandry while training the worker, but once the pasture is done on the worker stalls (T19), and there's nothing but farming for two more techs.

Better, I believe, is to slot in a workboat. That pushes your worker out a few turns, but gives you options. AH first still produces a stall, but a run to Bronze Working times out well - worker arrives the turn after chopping opens up.

It takes a touch of micro to time things out. Working the sheep for seven turns takes you to 21/22 . At this point, you want to switch to working a forested grassland hill. After 8 turns, you'll be pop 2 (0/24) with 10 hammers invested in the workboat. Work grassland hills with both pop, and the boat will be ready @ T12.

The workboat improves the crabs immediately, and the extra food (don't forget to reset the tiles you are working) shaves a couple turns off the worker (he arrives on T22), and the extra commerce brings in BW a little bit (T21).

At that point, you've unlocked Dogs, and can convert trees to units and maybe another worker while researching AH.

I made a couple of mistakes. Although I started exactly the way VoU suggests(yay for me since I played it yesterday) I overexpanded too early nearly crashing my economy, which halted my growth considerably.

My techpath was:
AH->Mining->BW->IW(to uncover good production sites)->sailing->masonry->mysticism->writing->polytheism->priesthood(for oracle, although it went earlier without me noticing;/)->pottery

My idea was to settle first few cities on the coast, sign open borders with other civs, and build Great Lighthouse to fund my expansion. It turned to be not enough. GLH only gave me additional 4(coastal cities)x2x2=16 commerce, and I could've gotten similar amount by simply settling a city near the double gems to the south east(6+7=13 commerce right there).

In retrospect I think I shoud've gone with:
AH->Mining->BW->Mysticism->Pottery->IW->Sailing->Masonry->Writing->whatever
And that's exactly what I'm gonna try next.

This was an interesting exercise. I usually don't expand this rapidally and don't play normal speed often - it goes by so fast. I could easily have had more cities but my economy crashed and with lots of axemen/archers coing from the SW I could not afford to lose my dogmen (who defended nicely.) My biggest mistake was not putting up cottages sooner. I actually had to stall a couple of settlers until I could afford it.

My population was generally impacted by using the whip but even more so from emergency whipping some Dogs after a mass of barbs (axemen no less) from the SW which I quickly had to put down. I ALMOST lost a city.

I think Stonehenge was a good play with the both the UB (although the bonus wasn't really used until this point) and not having to worry about border pops i all the cities. I basically whipped into the Stonehenge. Settled the GP later. I queued up the GL but don't expect to get it. However, failure cash would be most welcome.

I guess I could have gone after the 2 barb cities on the borders, but doing so would have stalled my natural expansion and Dogs are not that great attacking cities.

I'm Very undeveloped, but can whip in all needed buildings very soon with my high population count. Currency is coming in in 5 turns. I'm mostly building research to get currency sooner, cause another 11-22 commerce would be very, very nice right now.

Most new cities were put on hold in favor of cottages in older cities. Soon totem poles and granaries will be whipped/chopped in every city without one. After that, libraries will be chopped/whipped in the cottage cities (Most every one).

I'm surprised that people went for Stonehenge, but it obviously helped them out quite a bit. Same number of cities with the economy in better shape than mine (I can't imagine having time for Libraries) and only having to build granaries in new cities. If i retry this, i will definitely go for it.